Lunar Landing Missions Learning Path

Definition and scope of Moon landings

A Moon (lunar) landing is defined as the arrival of a spacecraft—crewed or robotic—on the Moon’s surface. The first human-made object to touch the Moon was Luna 2 in 1959, and the first crewed landing was Apollo 11 in 1969. Between 1969 and 1972, six crewed landings were carried out by the Apollo program; after Apollo ended in December 1972, no soft landings occurred until Chang’e 3 in 2013. Soft landings (landings without significant damage) have been performed mostly by uncrewed missions, while earlier “hard” landings involved intentional high-speed impacts. The scope of Moon landings includes both uncrewed and crewed missions, as well as different landing outcomes and mission architectures. Uncrewed landings span government and commercial efforts, including early hard-impact missions, later soft landings using braking rockets and retrorockets, and modern missions that may also return samples or operate rovers. For crewed landings, the Apollo program used a lunar module to land humans safely, and the broader mission scope also includes the supporting lunar-orbit phase needed for site selection and navigation. Technically, landing requires decelerating from lunar approach speeds to survivable contact speeds (or near-zero for soft landings), and mission planning must account for the need to leave the Moon afterward for crewed missions, which strongly influences the move from direct-to-surface approaches toward lunar-orbit rendezvous operations.

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Government uncrewed landings overview

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